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EMC raises its game by tapping 'the matrix'
Talk about swimming with Sharks

By Ian Fried

Published: Thursday 30 January 2003

EMC is expected to announce next week a long-awaited overhaul of its high-end products as it moves to narrow the performance gap with rivals in the storage market.

Monday's launch of EMC's Symmetrix 6 line, which sees a new internal architecture, is seen as a critical step in the company's efforts to regain lost ground in the high end of the market.

While the storage maker was able to post better-than-expected financial results last quarter, analysts said most of those gains were due to cost cuts and strong sales of its mid-range line of storage gear.

"Although it is about a year late, Symm 6 is important both for resuscitating [EMC's] mainstay product line as well as for its impact on other revenue lines," Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich said in a research note last week. Milunovich noted that EMC's total market share dropped from 13 per cent to 11 per cent in the third quarter of last year.

One of the technical highlights of the Symmetrix 6 line is expected to be a new 'matrix' architecture, designed to increase the speed of information travelling between internal components of the storage system, according to Milunovich and others familiar with the company's plans. The new products are also expected to offer higher amounts of cache memory and to reflect a switch from RAID-1 technology to a newer RAID-5 approach, which lets data be stored 'redundantly' - or in more than one place for backup purposes - but reduces the amount of disk space devoted to protecting data.

The new Symmetrix 6 line will consist of three models: the modular DMX800, the single-enclosure DMX1000 and the dual-enclosure DMX2000, according to Wall Street analysts and sources familiar with the company's plans.

EMC has scheduled an event in New York on Monday to launch the new products. Executives mentioned the launch in last week's earnings conference call but refused to talk specifics or answer questions about the new products. An EMC representative declined to discuss details of the new products for this article.

EMC's rivals, while downplaying the significance of the launch, are already responding to the company's move. IBM and Hitachi Data Systems are each announcing enhancements to their competing product lines.

Hitachi announced on Wednesday it is doubling the total capacity of its Lightning 9900 V series by adding the option of 146GB drives, bringing the total raw capacity to 148 terabytes and usable capacity to 128 terabytes. Hitachi also plans to announce an increase in connectivity, offering up to 64 Fibre Channel connections at 2GB per second.

Meanwhile, IBM is set to announce on Monday it is adding support for Bluefin, a proposed standard that lets software makers speak a common language when controlling storage systems. The company also plans to announce availability of faster 72GB hard drives.

"It's a three-horse race right now," Steve Kenniston, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group in San Jose, said of the high-end storage market.

At the same time, Kenniston said there is a clear difference between the touting of redesigned systems, such as EMC's expected announcement, and tweaks that represent a "turning of the crank", with faster drives or processors, such as the latest moves from IBM and Hitachi. EMC is expected to highlight the new data architecture within Symmetrix 6 systems.